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Can We Uninvent Suburbia?

There’s a fine story in our Sunday Styles section today by Alex Williams examining the environmental costs of suburban life, which evolved around the highway system, cheap oil, and the automobile and now typically consumes several times more energy per person (and thus fossil fuels) than urban living. There’s all that driving. There are the chugging mowers and fertilizers and pesticides used to keep all those lawns lovely. Lighting, heating and cooling those ballooning homes consumes vast amounts of energy compared to a city apartment — or a house half a century ago.

“The End of Suburbia,” an award-winning 2006 documentary, provides a fascinating overview of how the sprawled lifestyle evolved, the hidden — and not so hidden — costs, and what lies ahead. A trailer is on YouTube:

In 1946, when the American post war housing boom started, the average house was 1,100 square feet and housed 5 people. Fifty years latter, in 1996 the average house would grow to 2,200 square feet and house 2.6 people and by 2007, fueled by easy credit, the average American home would would become the equivalent of a Hummer, “weighing in” at super-sized 2,400 square feet.

I’ll be exploring efforts to “uninvent” suburbia in industrialized countries — and how to avoid having it be the new norm around cities in fast-growing developing countries. Experiments in the United States include turning old malls into walkable villages with housing, small retail businesses, and the like — somewhat like small-scale, less-grand variants of Masdar — the $22 billion car-free, solar-powered city for which ground was broken on Saturday next to the Abu Dhabi international airport.

Ellen Dunham-Jones, the director of the architecture program at Georgia Tech, calls the process “retrofilling.” A paper on this concept is here.

There’s plenty of fodder out there for such efforts. There’s a wonderful clickable map of “dead malls” online. Check out a few in your neighborhood.

Of course, the other goal of many designers, planners, and activists seeking to lighten humans’ environmental impact, put us back on our feet in walkable places, and generally invigorate communities is simply reviving cities and making them function better. (See a couple of my recent posts on mobility in cities here and here.

Alex Steffen, the founder of Worldchanging.com, a popular Web site and book on sustainability, recently posted an essay on this that is well worth reading, called “My Other Car is a Bright Green City.”

The answer to can we uninvent Suburbia is Queens, which in my youth was essentially a suburb and is now a city. Before that in my father’s time it was Brooklyn, a borough of little villages, and more recently Staten Island. The best way of accomplishing this is through good urban transit.

In the DC area where I now live, the biggest mall (Tyson’s corner) is in despair trying to attract a new Metro line. The most successful new malls (White Flint and Pentagon City are on the Metro.

How funny, yesterday I was “mowing”, paying close attention to that part of my country existence, thinking, “wow, we haven’t even explored the gas fueled lawn mower C02 emissions going on in the suburban areas of this planet on Dot Earth”.
Water shortages will certainly address the lawn syndrome sooner rather than later. Let’s watch what happens in Atlanta this summer after that post revealing the La Nina fueled drought in the Southeast?

I hate cities today. Hate them. I don’t care how much culture, diversity, and exciting energy lay within them, they’re dirty and if you really want to see the population problem in full manifestation, take a trip to a poor city, not the affluent, higher end, upper East sides of Manhattan or the Nob Hills of San Francisco. There is no way in hell I’ll ever live inside a city. I’d rather be shot….and chances are I would be shot there, or in one of those awful strip malls. Am I the only one who watches the news and wonders if this really is the human rat experiment playing itself out? Too many people in too small an environment? All edgy? Or is the news over doing it? Within 15 minutes on my drive home from school Friday I heard about 3 seperate shooting events involving the killing of children, court officials and the injury of a teacher. All took place within cities.
Here in Ferndale no one even has a key to their house. Yet we have nothing in the way of a great Italian restaurant or the American Museum of Natural History (now I could live inside that museum). But if I had to choose? I can cook Italian and go on a hike. Give me a green field, please.

I do, however, agree with you and this post on the hidden toxins and pollutions present when one lives far away from obvious polluted city culture. In a city, it’s all around you. Here in the country, it’s insidiously more diluted. The agricultural pollution alone is staggering. I do have to drive everywhere which bothers the hell out of me. There is no public transportation or anything close to “organic” or “conscious” living inside my tiny community. It’s all 40 minutes north. What do we do? Trade organic availability for buses, traffic, exhaust and pavement?
If I could find community living like the Amish or the Findhorn area in Scotland for instance, I’d relish being part of that kind of communal structure. But how can we EVER achieve that goal so many people and growing?
Some days solutions seem so illusive. Sadly, until a big chunk of OUR species disappears, all the thought, good and creative intention won’t matter. Too many rats in a restricted environment ultimately die of starvation, cannibalism or disease. And that doesn’t even touch upon the subject of our emotional and psychological equanimity that absolutely does demand peace and space.
I love my wild surroundings and all the trees, the sky, the myriad wildlife and peace that exists on and near my property. It fuels my spirit. It’s why I love awakening every morning. With no intention of offending anyone, I’d rather be dead than forced to live in a congested, filthy city. Sorry. Some wild animals die in captivity and I would too, especially surrounded by cement and steel towers or a Poltergeist/Stepford suburbia.
Elizabeth Tjader

Of course we can. The question for us to consider is whether we possess the political will and moral courage to do things other than continue down the politically convenient and economically expedient “primrose path” so adamantly and relentlessly pursued by too many leaders of the global economy.

As I sit here in suburbia (or in an area that might be considered somewhere between urbia and suburbia), I wanted to point out . . .

Today’s paper contains a Times editorial titled “Clean Power or Dirty Coal?”

It’s in Sunday Opinion within The Week in Review.

It’s a great piece and begins to move things in healthier directions. I recommend it to everyone.

That said, I only have two additional comments: First, given the immensity of the issue, I think that such fact-based news (they aren’t just random opinions if the majority of scientists are correct and if coal contains carbon, which of course it does, a lot!) should be communicated much more frequently on the front page. I don’t know how many people read the editorials (on Sunday) relative to how many see headlines on the front page, but the importance of the stuff conveyed in today’s editorial deserves a huge and attentive audience. It also deserves repetition, or “frequency” in the terms used by advertisers.

Second, the Times editorial makes the importance of Congress very clear. Thus, we can’t “just” focus on electing a new president who “gets” global warming and who will show leadership and resolve in addressing it: We also have to elect a Congress that “gets it” and that will work to energetically address the issue. My point is this: In my view, the Times should find out, and convey to the public (in one place and in organized fashion), the views of each and every Congressperson, and person running for Congress, regarding a moratorium on coal-fired power plants (until their carbon dioxide emissions can be eliminated), a carbon “cap-and-auction” or “cap-and-trade” system, or carbon tax, and related matters having to do with global warming. Anna Haynes mentioned the idea on Dot Earth, several weeks ago, of a survey that would be sent to each Congressperson regarding global warming. I support the idea and think it’s great. And, now, three of the four remaining presidential candidates are Senators. So, if a clear survey is sent to all Congresspeople, regarding their specific views related to global warming (and potential ways to address it), those three presidential candidates will be expected to respond, along with the others. I can’t think of a more important initiative right now on this subject, all things considered.

That said, I want to congratulate and thank the Times for the great editorial today. Bravo!

You know another subject I’d like to see explored within our evolving “living” environments? Addictions; Drugs. Debt. Shopping. Gambling. Violence. Deterioration in health care. Dumping our elders into sterile, cold, impersonal hospitals. The ridiculous Disney theme parks.
Talk about a screwed up species?
I’d bet my life so much of what is going on with regard to our “medicating” efforts has everything to do with our packed, crammed, suffocating “spaceship” Earth, and trying to live up to a success Wall Street determined. Talk about a pandemic? Greed.
For anyone who thinks we’re progressing as a species, let’s take a look at what we do for, “fun”, quote, unquote, as we contribute to the 6th massive extinction process on Earth which does not include the homosapien. That means, “ending” forever the life of many innocent species who have equal right if not more to exist here. Where do they fit into our new neighborhoods?
You know what? We NEED to return to a sustainable population of humans, however that unfolds. No “green” neighborhood is going to solve the human population problem and trashing of this planet.
Elizabeth Tjader

Most of the rest of the world does live in clustered housing creating some kind of “village” environment. You can see the difference in land use patterns from the air.

Some urban apartment buildings in the US do become a sort of village.

As for American suburbia, it is the homeland of hostility. You can’t walk 10 minutes in either direction from my home in Gloucester Massachusetts without encountering people who assert, most unpleasantly, that you’re trespassing by walking past their house. You’ll have to get over that to have clustered housing here.

I feel blessed to live in a so-called “first generation” suburb outside of Philadelphia. Like Queens–but on a much smaller level, given the relative difference in population–it has convenient public transpo to the city and its own downtown center with restaurants, a dry cleaners, a grocery store, etc. Then, up the street, it has all the creature comforts of suburbia–big box stores, etc.

I think/hope this is the trend around the country. But infrastructure is expensive to build. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s political will to subsidize development in these areas. Because I’m not going to live around here forever, and I’d like to move to something comparable in another corner of the country.

Re: the guy who proclaims he “hates the city,” I would be interested to know if he works in the city, thereby using its sidewalks, its utilities on a daily basis. Suburban dwellers, for all their contempt for city life, forget how much they actually rely on cities.

And, for the record, this suburbanite can’t patronize Philadelphia enough. I love the city and don’t mind paying for it.
[ANDY REVKIN notes: One great aspect of Philadelphia and its suburbs is the spokes of commuter rail lines that connect the two. New York City has its commuter trains, as well, including the Hudson River line that I ride. But the Philadelphia system seems much more “evolved” and encompassing.]

In two years when the first hydrogen cars are produced, your agenda will be an anachronism. Human beings were meant to live in nature; cities, while necessary to further culture, breed cancer and paranoia over the long haul, at least as conceived at present. Do you know anything about the etiology of cancer?

We moved from a suburb in Central America 6 years ago where the grass was green in the rainy season and resembled toast in the dry season. We never watered or fertilized it, yet it survived.

Much to my husband’s chagrin, I’ve insisted we take the same approach with our New England suburban lawn. It looks like hell, but we’re set back from the street so it can’t disgust anyone but ourselves.

As much as I love my not-so-green acre, we hope to wake up from the suburban nightmare and move to a city when my youngest graduates high school.

Great topic. See the movie “The End of Suburbia.” Another one about Cuba called “The Power of Community” shows how Cuba survived the shock of being cut off from cheap oil when the former Soviet Union capitulated.

For images and explanation on Suburban Permaculture, go to //www.suburbanpermaculture.org – many before and now fotos of turning a suburban property into a permaculture shangri la in Eugene, Oregon. Started 8 years ago.

Suburbia is a marketing device. From the beginnning it was about land speculation and development. Brooklyn was a ferry suburb to Manhattan. Levittown was heavily encouraged by government policy to fill a houseing shortage and provide a place for consumer products from factories that just a few years before will manufacturing war products. A highly recommended book “Crabgrass Frontier” by Kenneth Jackson is a very readable history of suburbia.

What to do with what we have? Suburbia does have potential to take care of far more of its needs. I have retroffitted my 1/4 acre 1955 suburban home in Eugene, Oregon. The grass is gone, replaced by a edible landscaping all over. Fruit trees, nuts, brambles, blueberries, grapes, veggies. I have a 3500 gallaon rain water catchment/storage/distribution system that runs on gravity for irrigation. The driveway is gone, replaced by a shed, English Walnut, brambles, banana tree, the garage is turned into a living space, a passive solar bungalow built in the back yard, 350 ft sq sunroom for passive solar heating- if it works this well in Eugene, it will work far better in 85% of the rest of the country.

My place attracts a lot of attention from the media, and people call and e mail pby way of my website and media attention] asking for advice on their own projects all the time.

We gave bike tours in Eugene to visit the growing number of conversion projects around town. fotos on my website. See a 25 minute you tube video on my place, search “suburban permaculture” and there it is. A Google search of suburban permaculture will also land on my website- //www.suburbanpermaculture.org

Not all suburbia is created equal. Some areas have a prayer, others not so much and will likely have to be abandoned.

Much of our economy depends on suburbia- cars, highways, furnishings, keeping it all running. The external costs are becoming too much to support. [it was not a good idea in the first place] As suburbia goes into mortal decline, so will many of those jobs.

Building community, living closr to home, trading stuff for quality relationships. Economics is about taking care of needs, we can do a lot of that in a non cash economy in our neighborhoods. Market global capitalism will not be a ally for creating a peacefull and socially uplifted world that planet earth can sustain.

There is a great deal of opportunity for building an eco logical culture that nurtures positive human potential where we live within our economic and environmental means.

An acre of land can provide a lot of food; particularly if there’s a few chickens around the house to help fertilize the vegetables and provide some eggs. Given that most suburban houselots are one to three acres, the idea of “local” food ought to include some back-yard vegetables instead of just hybrid flowers.

Although a provocative question, the answer is no. Having said that, there is much we can do to mitigate the impact of suburban living on the environment now and to shape the evolution of suburbia into tomorrow’s environmentally friendly cities. As Eli Rabett points out, the villages of yesterday are the cities of today.

This is a multifaceted problem with no magic bullet fixes. We need a long term strategy, politcal will and adequate support and subsidies from the government to make it happen.

Fortunately, there are a number of technological developments that will help. The solar power industry is making significant progress in lowering the cost of solar panels and even incorporating them into building materials. Practical, affordable electric cars that get over 200 miles per charge with fast re-charge batteries are in our near future. Work is already underway to develop a battery exchange program so instead of filling up the tank, you pop in a charged battery pack and leave your depleted one. Coupling solar power generation – which is also more efficient from a distribution stand point – with electric car us can very materially reduce the carbon footprint of suburban living.

Designing new mass transit systems can shape the evolution of suburbia into tomorrow’s cities, as a number of commentators have pointed out.

Of course, these are only some of the approaches we need to implement.

Accomplishing these changes will require massive new infrastructure investments. Do we have the political will to do this?

Suburban sprawl is already being wrenched by prevailing economic forces. The sub prime meltdown and the rising cost of gasoline is undercutting the price of suburban real estate while urban rents and prices remain relatively strong. Rents in fact, in the urban core, are soaring. Even before the runup in petroleum prices and the misguided adventure into mortgages by investment bankers, urban gentrification was a significant force, enough so that many African Americans have complained about it driving them from the centers of cities.

The countervailing forces are the ideas of telecommuting, the constrained nature of urban cores and that effect on housing costs and the problematic concerns of crime and poor schools in most urban areas. For investors, finding properties in suburban areas with a burgeoning industrial areas would be a good play.

Certain Manhattanites would do well to consult the definition of cosmopolitanism. How is it that natives of such a hub of international interest can be so laughably provincial? You want to “uninvent” the suburbs? My suburb is my home, thank you, and I wouldn’t trade my home here for a sardine can on your island — as much as I like to visit.

The problems of gross inefficiency and adoption of luxury habits as essentials of lifestyle are no more tied to suburbia than to urban living. And on the whole, folks who grew up in neighborhoods with front lawns like the idea of keeping them around. Change their habits, yes, but don’t advocate for destroying their way of life.
[ANDY REVKIN notes: Cities are implicitly more energy and resource efficient, as the Styles article and earlier posts quantify. That is not to say that everyone in suburbia is a villain. Of course it is attitudes and values that shape lives, and, in the end, landscapes. Frequent-flying city dwellers with two weekend houses, for instance, undoubtedly can have a bigger environmental footprint than someone living on a half acre outside of Chicago.

One thing to note: If, by “certain Manhattanites,” you were alluding to me, you must have missed my earlier post and video tour of the woods around my house. I live on a dirt road in the mid Hudson Valley on three acres of land returning to forest from early 20th-century cow pasture. About 1/4 acre is mowed so the kids can play. I telecommute as much as possible, and take the train to New York City when I go. The house was built of fieldstone in 1930 by the family we bought it from.]

I’m glad to finally see the green movement expose itself for what it is: a socialist movement to control individual freedom. I saw it at college and knew we would end up here, people using global warming as a club to force everyone into “utopian” living: Apartment living, mass transit using, high tax paying (if only they had a little more money we could solve all of those city problems…) populace. I’ve lived in cities like Manahattan, Philadelphia and San Francisco and in suburbs around milwaukee, washington d.c. and san francisco. I love the city, good for me. My parents hate they city, good for them. They pay more to heat their home, pay more in gas (and gas taxes which pay for roads and mass transit), spend time mowing their lawn etc. In the city, I pay more to live in a small box suspended in the air, i pay more to feed myself, and need to worry about my personal safety and health. Its my choice, i pay for it, i like it. My freedom, my choice, my responsibility to pay. Lets all celebrate the diversity of living styles in this country and having the choice to follow individual preference.
[ANDY REVKIN notes: You’re absolutely right, of course, as long as someone pays for the hidden costs of any kind of life, whether suburban, rural, or urban. For instance, who pays the “cost” of lost biodiversity when a suburban development or highway cuts off a wildlife corridor? That wildlife route can be maintained, along with housing that people will enjoy, through planning, zoning, and other efforts that must come through common assent and government — not purely out of individual choice. So there’s a wide range of governance and freedoms between authoritarian control and complete disregard for the commons, no?]

We need our goverment officials to get past the idea that “growth” is the ideal. While they’re planning[not] their suburban sprawl make them add green belts around their cities. Future generations will honor them. Can you imagine Manhattan without Central Park? Developers still covet that land. Donald Trump is planning to desecrate Jones Beach State Park.

The Alex Williams story, cited at the beginning of this article, told of a woman who spent $12,000 to install a wind turbine behind her suburban house. Imagine if every suburbanite did this. Imagine if every suburban house had a vegatable garden instead of a useless lawn. Imagine lawns given over not just to vegetable gardens but to native plants, which could be eaten and inhabited by wildlife.

I live in the woods myself, having fled Boston several years ago due to the congestion, pollution, noise, impossible rents, and complete lack of natural environment (no trees unless you can afford to live on a nice street). I won’t ever go back. But I try to limit my impact on the woods where I live as much as possible. No lawn — when we bought our house, we let the lawn revert to a natural state. We grow organic vegetables. We heat our house with a pellet stove. My husband and I share one, small car.

Suburbia and rural life don’t need to end, but we need to change our ways. People who own their own homes have more opportunity than renters do to install solar panels and wind turbines. With more tax incentives and public programs to help people install these technologies, we could revolutionize what it means to be suburban.

I saw a pattern of sprawling suburbs being reversed, and then the opposite recurring, in Palo Alto, where I am from. The University district used to have huge houses built from 1920-1950 that had been cut up into apartments in the 60’s, due to the high cost of housing in the area. Then, when tech boomed a few decades later, giant mansions sprouted again, and smaller houses and apartments were razed.

One overlooked problem is the view of houses in this country as a disposable consumer product. Sure sprawl is bad, but public transport and electric cars could make that better in the future. Just as important is our sick habit of building houses out of two by fours, which begin to fall apart in a few decades and then become cost effective to tear down and send to a landfill.

We have to start using inert and durable materials. Logging to produce housing lumber contributes 192 million tons of CO2 emissions annually to the atmosphere. Replacing wood with recycled steel would reduce that figure to 25.3 million tons, a greater greenhouse gas savings than suddenly making zero emissions new cars.

Urban sprawl and subsequent dependency on the polluting automobile was infused into rural American villages nearly four decades ago by Wal Mart and later by its “wannabes”. Wal Mart’s marketing scheme was and is to locate well away from the center of small communities and away from downtown competition to reduce or eliminate consumer “cross-shopping”. Wal Mart’s successful sprawl strategy has resulted in the destruction of centralized downtowns which were environmentally efficient next door neighbors to residential areas and therfore enviornmentally friendly. Four decades ago people often walked and shopped. This is no longer possible because downtowns are now ghost towns. Today’s dominant Wal Marts and “wannabes” are miles away from residential centers. Walking and shopping is impossible. The result: even rural American villages have become polluting suburbs.

To the first comment, Staten Island is an example of how a suburban area is becoming an urban area only because it was an example, in the late ’60s and 70’s, of how a beautifully-functioning borough of small downtowns became a sprawling, car-centric suburb thanks to Robert Moses, the V-N Bridge and the Staten Island Expressway. As someone who left because of that and hasn’t returned, I can attest that it was better the old way.

I lived in Northeast Philly for 35 years in a split level neighborhood. Most of the houses had a larger 45 degree pitched roof and a roof over the bedrooms that had four sides, less pitched. There were about 150 houses in my section, Golden Gate. The roofing is asphalt shingles that needs replacing every twenty years or so and they are over plywood and framing rafters.
So more then twenty years ago I was wondering about solarizing the neighborhood.
I wondered that if you put ten collectors on each house and had a computer model that regarded the suns course throughout the year and laid out the panels so that there would be an optimized return and shared the gain , this is to say that there was a junction at the entrance to the neighborhood, and the savings were deducted from the homes or paid for the collectors (the Clinton Model) then that might be a good thing.
So i called a professor at Drexel’s engineering department but he said that solar never would pay for itself and that it takes more energy to make it then it is worth. I don’t know who he was. I’m always beleaguered and don’t go out exploring these things.
This still might be a good idea. If installed twenty years ago it would by now have paid for itself and saved tons of coal and whatever.
In Philly there were a lot of properties that were rotten and people moved out of the city and built in Bucks County and other counties. So it has to be an imperative to keep renewal a priority. Tear down the old and build new before people buy up farms and orchards and build on that land. But people need a place to live and having a yard and your own house is nice. Not everybody likes apartments and townhouses.

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By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to pass nine billion. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. Dot Earth was created by Andrew Revkin in October 2007 -- in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship -- to explore ways to balance human needs and the planet's limits.